Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever owned the human voice, or ever will. (Other, of course, than their own.)

Because podcasting is about the human voice. It’s humans talking to humans: voices to ears and voices to voices—because listeners can talk too. They can speak back. And forward. Lots of ways.

Podcasting is one way for markets to have conversations; but the podcast market itself can’t be bought or controlled, because it’s not a market. Or an “industry.” Instead, like the Web, email and other graces of open protocols on the open Internet, podcasting is all-the-way deep.

Deep like, say, language. And, like language, it’s NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it. That means anybody and everybody can do wherever they want with it. It’s theirs—and nobody’s—for the taking.

Both of those are tools created by Dave Winer, alpha dad of blogging, podcasting and syndicating. Dave was half the guests on Friday evening’s opening panel. The other half was Christopher Lydon, whose own podcast, Radio Open Source, was born out of his creative partnership with Dave in the early chapters of podcasting’s Genesis, in 2003, when both were at Harvard’s Berkman (now Berkman Klein) Center.

One way you can tell nobody owns podcasting is that 1.5 decades have passed since 2003 and there are still no dominant or silo’d tools either for listening to podcasts or for making them.

On the listening side, there is no equivalent of, say, the browser. There are many very different ways to get podcasts, and all of them are wildly different as well. Remarkably (or perhaps not), the BigCo leaders aren’t leading. Instead they’re looking brain-dead.

The biggest example is Apple, which demonstrates its tin head through its confusing (and sales-pressure-intensive) iTunes app on computers and its Podcasts app, defaulted on the world’s billion iPhones. That app’s latest version is sadly and stupidly rigged to favor streaming from the cloud over playing already-downloaded podcasts, meaning you can no longer listen easily when you’re offline, such as when you’re on a plane. By making that change, Apple treated a feature of podcasting as a bug. Also dumb: a new UI element—a little set of vertical bars indicating audio activity—that seems to mean both live playing and downloading. Or perhaps neither. I almost don’t want to know at this point, since I have come to hate the app so much.

Other tools by smaller developers (e.g. Overcast) do retain the already-downloaded feature, but work in different ways from other tools. Which is cool to me, because that way no one player dominates.

On the production side there are also dozens of tools and services. As a wannabe podcaster (whose existing output is limited so far to three podcasts in twelve years), I have found none that make producing a podcast as easy as it is to write a blog or an email. (When that happens, watch out.)

So here’s a brief compilation of my gatherings, so far, in no order of importance, from the conference.

Podcasting needs an unconference like IIW (the next of which happens the first week of May in Silicon Valley): one devoted to conversation and forward movement of the whole field, and not to showcasing panels, keynotes or sponsoring vendors. One advantage of unconferences is that they’re all about what are side conversations at standard keynote-and-panel conferences. An example from my notes: Good side conversations. One is with Sovana Bailey McLain (@solartsnyc), whose podcast is also a radio show, State of the Arts. And she has a blog too. The station she’s on is WBAI, which has gone through (says Wikipedia) turmoil and change for many decades. An unconference will also foster something many people at the conference said they wanted: more ways to collaborate.

Now is a good time to start selling off over-the-air radio signals. Again from my notes… So I have an idea. It’s one WBAI won’t like, but it’s a good one: Sell the broadcast license, keep everything else. WBAI’s signal on 99.5fm is a commercial one, because it’s on the commercial part of the FM band. This NY Times report says an equivalent station (WQXR when it was on 96.3fm) was worth $45 million in 2009. I’m guessing that WBAI’s licence would bring about half that because listening is moving to Net-connected rectangles, and the competition is every other ‘cast in the world. Even the “station” convention is antique. On the Net there are streams and files:stuff that’s live and stuff that’s not. From everywhere. WBAI (or its parent, the Pacifica Foundation), should sell the license while the market is still there, and use the money to fund development and production of independent streams and podcasts, in many new ways. Keep calling the convening tent WBAI, but operate outside the constraints of limited signal range and FCC rules.

Compared to #podcasting, the conventions of radio are extremely limiting. You don’t need a license to podcast. You aren’t left out of the finite number of radio channels and confined geographies. You aren’t constrained by FCC anti-“profanity” rules limiting freedom of speech—or any FCC rules at all. In other words, you can say what the fuck you please, however you want to say it. You’re free of the tyranny of the clock, of signposting, of the need for breaks, and other broadcast conventions. All that said, podcasting can, and does, improve radio as well. This was a great point made on stage by the @kitchensisters.

Podcasting conventionally copyrighted music is still impossible. On the plus side, there is no license-issuing or controlling entity to do a deal with the recording industry to allow music on podcasts, because there is nothing close to a podcasting monopoly. (Apple could probably make such a deal if it wanted to, but it hasn’t, and probably won’t.) On the minus side, you need to “clear rights” for every piece of music you play that isn’t “podsafe.” That includes nearly all the music you already know. But then, back on the plus side, this means podcasting is nearly all spoken word. In the past I thought this was a curse. Now I think it’s a grace.

Today’s podcasting conventions are provisional and temporary. A number of times during the conference I observed that the sound coming from the stage was one normalized by This American Life and its descendants. In consonance with that, somebody put up a slide of a tweet by @emilybell:podcast genres : 1. Men going on about things. 2. Whispery crime 3.Millennials talking over each other 4. Should be 20 minutes shorter. We can, and will, do better. And other.

Maybe podcasting is the best way we have to start working out our problems with race, gender, politics and bad habits of culture that make us unhappy and thwart progress of all kinds. I say that because 1) the best podcasting I know deals with these things directly and far more constructively than anything I have witnessed in other media, and 2) no bigfoot controls it.

Archiving is an issue. I don’t know what a “popup archive” is, but it got mentioned more than once.

Podcasting has no business model. It’s like the Internet, email and the Web that way. You make money because of it, not with it. If you want to. Since it can be so cheap to do (in terms of both time and money), you don’t have to make money at it if you don’t want to.

I’ll think of more as I go over more of my notes. Meanwhile, please also dig Dave’s take-aways from the same conference.

What I’ve always loved most about the Web† is how it allows each of us to publish on our own, as individuals, for the whole world. I started doing that as soon as I could get a dial-up account with a nearby ISP (the late Batnet of Palo Alto) in 1995.

Here is one of my first pieces, published in Reality 2.0, a directory within my self-hosted Searls.com site. I’m resurrecting it here because it does a good job of explaining how easy it is to automate journalism by framing a story in terms of war or sports (and tees up some future posts). So here ya go, copied from HTML 1 and morphed on pasting by WordPress into HTML 4:

MICROSOFT +NETSCAPEWHY THE PRESS NEEDS TO SNAP OUT OF ITS WAR-COVERAGE TRANCE

Outline

Web Wars?

Am I wrong here, or has the Web turned into a Star Wars movie?

I learn from the papers that the desktop world has fallen under the iron grip of the most wealthy and powerful warlord in the galaxy. With a boundless greed for money and control, Bill Gates of Microsoft now seeks to extend his evil empire across all of cyberspace.

The galaxy’s only hope is a small but popular rebel force called Netscape. Led by a young pilot (Marc Andreesen as Luke Skywalker), a noble elder (Jim Clark as Obi-wan Kanobe) and a cocky veteran (Jim Barksdale as Han Solo), Netscape’s mission is joined by the crafty and resourceful Java People from Sun.

“MICROSOFT TAKES WAR TO THE NET: Software giant plots defensive course based on openness”

“MICROSOFT UNVEILS INTERNET STRATEGY: Stage set for battle with Netscape.”

“MICROSOFT, SUN FACE OFF IN INTERNET RING”

“MICROSOFT STORMS THE WEB”

The mind’s eye conjures a vision of The Emperor, deep in the half-built Death Star of Microsoft’s new Internet Strategy, looking across space at the Rebel fleet, his face twisted with contempt. “Your puny forces cannot win against this fully operational battle station!” he growls.

But the rebels are confident. “In a fight between a bear and an alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain,” Marc Andreessen says. “What Microsoft just did was move into our terrain.”

And Microsoft knows its strengths. December 7th, The Wall Street Journal writes, Bill Gates “issued a thinly veiled warning to Netscape and other upstarts that included a reference to the Pearl Harbor attack on the same date in 1941.”

Exciting stuff. But is there really a war going on? Should there be?

What are the facts?

After reading all these alarming headlines, I decided to fire up my own copy of Netscape Navigator and search out a transcript of Bill’s December 7th speech.

I started at Microsoft’s own site, but got an “access forbidden” message. Then I went up to the internet level of the site’s directory, but found the Netscape view was impaired. (“Best viewed with Microsoft Explorer,” it said.) I finally found a Netscape-friendly copy at Dave Winer’s site. It appears to be the original, verbatim:*

MR. GATES: Well, good morning. I was realizing this morning that December 7th is kind of a famous day. (Laughter.) Fifty-four years ago or something. And I was trying to think if there were any parallels to what was going on here. And I really couldn’t come up with any. The only connection I could think of at all was that probably the most intelligent comment that was made on that day wasn’t made on Wall Street, or even by any type of that analyst; it was actually Admiral Yamomoto, who observed that he feared they had awakened a sleeping giant. (Laughter.)

I see. The “veiled threat” was Bill’s opening laugh line. Even if this was “a veiled threat,” it was made in good humor. The rest of the talk hardly seemed hostile. Instead, Bill showed a substantial understanding of how both competition and cooperation work to build markets, and of the roles played by users, developers, leaders and followers in creating the Internet. In his final sentence, Bill says, “We believe that integration and continuity are going to be valuable to end users and developers…”

Of course, I wish he’d pay a little more attention to Macintosh users and developers, but I don’t blame him for avoiding them. I blame Apple, which dissed and sued Microsoft for years, to no positive effect. Apple played a zero-sum game and — sure enough — ended up with zero. Brilliant strategy.

Think how much farther along we would be today if this relationship was still Apple plus Microsoft, rather than Apple vs. Microsoft.

The truth is that the Web will be better served by Microsoft plus Netscape than by Microsoft vs. Netscape. Plus is what most of us want, and it’s probably what we’ll get, regardless of how the press plays the story.

Let’s give a big AND to the Web

So what is the best way to characterize Microsoft, if not as the Heaviest of Heavies?

I think Release 1.0‘s Jerry Michalski gets closest to it when he says: “Microsoft thinks more broadly than any other company about what it’s doing. Its plans include global telecommunications, information creation, applications — even community building.” That tells us a lot more than “Microsoft goes to war.”

Markets are more than battlefields. The OR logic of war and sports get us excited, but tells us little of real substance. For that we also need the AND logic of cooperation, choice, partnership and working together. What we all want most — love — is hardly an OR proposition. Imagine a lover saying “there’s only room in this relationship for one of us, baby.”

But the press is caught in an OR trance. Blind to the AND logic that gives markets their full color, the press reduces every hot story to the black vs. white metaphors of war and sports. Why cover the Web as the strange, unprecedented place it is, when you can play it as yet another story about two guys trying to beat the crap out of each other? Especially when the antagonists are little good guy and a big bad guy?

Look, the Internet didn’t take off because Netscape showed up; and it wasn’t slowed down because Microsoft didn’t. It took off because millions of people added their creative energies to something that welcomed them — which was mostly each other. Death-fight competition didn’t make the Web we know now, and it won’t make the Web that’s coming, either.

That’s because every site on the Web is AND logic at work. So is every vendor/developer relationship that ever produced a product or created a market. So is the near-infinite P/E ratio Netscape enjoys today.

So, what IS Microsoft doing?

“Embrace and extend,” Bill Gates called it in his December 7 talk. That’s what he said Microsoft will do with products from Oracle, Spyglass, Compuserve and Sun. Is this an AND strategy? Or is it yet an other example of what Gary Reback, Judge Sporkin and other Microsoft enemies call a “lock and leverage” strategy, intended to drive out competition and let Microsoft charge tolls to every traveler on the Information Highway?

We’ll see.

It should be clear by now that the Web does not welcome OR strategies. Microsoft Network was an OR strategy, and it didn’t work. If history repeats itself (as it usually does with Microsoft), the company will learn from this experience (as Apple learned earlier from its eWorld failure) and move on to do the Right Thing.

Not that most of the press would notice. To them Microsoft is The Empire and Bill is its gold-armored emperor. But reporters are the ones putting clothes on this emperor. To the people who make Microsoft’s markets — the users and developers — “billg” is as naked as a newborn.

Take away the war-front headlines, the play-by-play reporting, the color commentary by industry analysts, the infatuation with personal wealth — and you see Bill as an extremely competitive guy who’s also trying to do right by users and developers. And hiding little in the process. Is he a bully? Sometimes. Is this bad? No, it’s typical of big companies since the dawn of business. It looks to me more like a personality trait than a business strategy. And what makes Microsoft win is far more strategic than personal.

Blinded by the robber-baron image assigned in U.S. history courses to the heroic builders of American capitalism, many critics see Bill Gates as a menacing monopolist. They mistake for greed the gargantuan tenacity of Microsoft as it struggles to assure the compatibility of its standard with tens of thousands of applications and peripherals over generations of dynamically changing technology.

How to win users and influence developers

How does Bill express that tenacity? As Dave Winer puts it in “The Platform is a Chinese Household,” Bill “sends flowers.” Bill courts developers and delivers for customers, who return the favor by buying Microsoft products.

Markets are conversations, and there isn’t a more willing conversational participant than Bill. That’s why I’m not surprised when Dave says “the only big company that’s responsive to my needs is Microsoft.” And Dave, by the way, is a pillar of the Macintosh community. To my knowledge, he hasn’t developed a DOS-compatible product since the original ThinkTank.

Users and developers don’t need to hear vendors talk about how much their competition sucks. No good ever comes of it. Is it just coincidence that Microsoft almost never bad-mouths its competition? Though Bill is hardly innocent of the occasional raspberry, he’s a long way from matching the nasty remarks made about him and his company by leaders at Sun, Apple, Netscape and Novell, just to name an obvious few.

It especially saddens me to hear competition-bashing from Guy Kawasaki, whose positive energies Apple desperately needs right now. As a customer and user of both Apple and Microsoft products, I see Guy’s “how to drive your competition crazy” rap as OR logic at its antiproductive worst.

At the opposite end of the diplomacy scale, I like the way Gordon Eubanks of Symantec has consistently been fair and constructive in his public remarks about Bill and Microsoft (and has reaped ample rewards in the process).

What makes markets work is a combination of AND and OR processes that deserve thoughtful and observant journalism. They also call for vendors who can drop their fists, open their minds and look at opportunities from users’ and developers’ points of view. This is how Microsoft came to change its Internet strategy. And this is what makes Microsoft the most adaptive company in the business, regardless of size. No wonder the laws of Darwin have been kind to them.

A new breed of life

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance…

Always substance and increase,

Always a knit of identity… always distinction…

Always a breed of life.

—Walt Whitman

Where the language of war fails, perhaps the language of Whitman can succeed.

By the great poet’s lights, the Web is a new breed of life. An original knit of identity. Its substance increases when opposite equals like Netscape and Microsoft advance out of the dimness and obey their procreant urges — not their will to kill.

The Web is a product of relationships, not of victors and victims. Not one dime Netscape makes is at Microsoft’s expense. And Netscape won’t bleed to death if Microsoft produces a worthy browser. The Web as we know it won’t be the same in six weeks, much less six months or six years. As a “breed of life,” it is original, crazy and already immense. It is not like anything. To describe it with cheap-shot war and sports metaphors is worse than wrong — it is bad journalism.

*A week after this experience, I went back to Microsoft site and found its whole Internet Strategy directory much more Netscape-friendly and nicely organized. Every presentation is there, including all the slides. Though the slides are in PowerPoint 4.0 for Windows, my Mac is able to view them with the Mac version of the program. [Back to *]

George Gilder’s Forbes ASAP article archives are at his Telecosm site.

† [Added on 8 September 2015] While the Webbegan as a hypertext project proposed to CERN by two employees there (Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Calliau) on 12 November 1990, it did not turn into the Web we know today (and one I could access through an ISP) until it opened for commercial activity on 30 April 1995. That was when the NSFnet (one of the Net’s many backbones, and the only one forbidding commercial use) stepped aside.

I just ran across a post (below) on my old blog from Tuesday, July 12, 2005: a few months less than ten years ago. It was at the tail end of what Tantek Çelikcalls the Independent Web. He gives the time frame for that as roughly 2001-2005, peaking in 2003 or so. “We took it as an assumption that if you were creating, you were putting yourself on the Web, on your own site… We all assumed that it was sort of our inevitable destiny that the Web was open, the Net was open, everyone had their own identity — to the point where everyone knew each other not by our names but by our URLs, our domain names, because everyone owned their domain and had control over it.”

What happened, he adds, was silos. Twitter popularized simplicity. Then Facebook built a big new ecosystem “that has nothing to do with the open Web.” They also made lots of stuff, such as identity, highly convenient. Log in anywhere with Facebook Connect (and don’t look at what’s happening behind the curtain).

And now most of our experiences on the Web are inside and between giant silos that add up to a system Bruce Schneier calls feudal. It’s got some nice stuff in it, but it’s not ours. It’s theirs.

So, while we wait for emancipation, it’s interesting to look back on what life was like on the Web when it was still ours.

Note that what I wrote on the old blog was outlines. Every new post was a top level item, and subordinate ones came under it. Today Dave Winer gives us a similar tool with Liveblog.

I’m a little surprised that Doc’s take on the information is that people have “jumped to conclusions based on what one guy said,” since that is the very essence of blogging: A single correspondent reported something that would have otherwise been ignored. A lot of people are very interested in how Technorati might make money and, more to the point, help them make money.

It’s one thing to point to something one person said, and another to jump to conclusions based on it. To me the latter is not “the essence of blogging.” In fact, it’s what too many big-J journalists do, and what too many of those journalists also accuse bloggers of doing.

I like Mitch’s other points about Technorati’s business model(s). I think when this is over we’ll see a lot more transparency from everybody whose business lives in the blogosphere.

Jeremy Wright busts Technorati for its performance:

Technorati¹s index is slow. If it¹s taking Technorati 5-20 hours to bring a post in (if it does at all), that is 4-19 hours slower than Bloglines. It¹s inaccurate. It¹s lucky if it shows 10% of the results that PubSub, Bloglines and Blogpulse show. It¹s also a SLOW site. Response times of 1 minute aren¹t uncommon, and even then results sometimes simply aren¹t shown.

I stuck up for Technorati for quite a while (and they¹re featured prominently in the book, which I now regretŠ hopefully I won¹t by the time the book comes out). But, Technorati has had 2 years to fix it¹s problems. Doc wants us to cut them some more slack, but I¹ve just about run out of slack. There are other services that are faster, more detailed, more comprehensive and actually listen to bloggers¹ concerns instead of making excuses.

Good on Jeremy. Frankly, Technorati is a joke in terms of indexing speed and accuracy. I can tag posts and not see them, well, ever. The fact you get listed at all is a miracle. He is right. As a user, they have let the blogosphere down. Doc Searls has a longer post on this. Doc, it’s great you are all chums but for us mere minions it just ain’t working and what doesn’t work, doesn’t get used. Simple as that.

For what it’s worth, I have a pile of Technorati and PubSub subscriptions. And for a long time, PubSub kicked ass. (And I often let Technorati’s techies know about it.) Lately Technorati seems to be doing better. But hey, your mileage may vary. For what it’s worth, I found both Jeremy’s and Andy’s posts in a Technorati search.

That said, Technorati’s failings have done a lot to cost some users faith in the service. There are still outages and breakdowns. There are on any service that’s scaling at the same rate. How often have you seen Flickr down for a “massage”?

What matters is that they keep working on it and improving it. Looks to me like they’re doing that.

I suspect that one of the issues here is the lack of cluefulness of Technorati, however, who have seemed to surprise everyone with their intention to make money — and lots of it — from its activities and services. Here’ is a great opportunity for Dave Sifry and company to leverage what they know about blog dynamics to head off a potential big stink. Remember the “Founding Fathers” flap from the Always On/Technorati Open Media 100 announcement?…

Technorati will inevitably — to the degree that it is successful — influence the behavior of those who would like to benefit from the power thet comes from a high Technorati ranking, just like the lengths that people will go to in order to get a high Google ranking. As a result, Technorati will need to have very scrupulous business practices in its dealings with those to whom it sells its services.

This is likely to flare up into a big imbloglio, with many perspectives swirling around, and a lot of hand waving and finger pointing. But I think it is a tempest in a teapot. The implicit social connections that blog linking imply are public: they are there for anyone to see, and the individuals involved actively create those links with that in mind. This is not some sort of surreptitious surveillance, like video cameras on street lights, or someone tapping our phone calls. And more importantly, as Doc suggests, the world is a better place if big corporations begin to take advantage of this information to figure out what people think is important, whose thoughts and observations matter, and how to better understand what is going on in the world. What is the alternative? We — the Blogosphere — are going to a lot of trouble to read and link to one others’ writing out here; do we want the rest of the world to ignore it? We are trying hard to make sense of the world; it’s stupid to think we would be better off if the world doesn’t pay attention, and adapt to the feedback system we have become. The value of that feedback is enormous, and people should be free to make money from turning it into bite-sized chunks for companies that want to do better: build better products, provide better service, and innovate more quickly.

The Blogosphere is not some private club for those most actively engaged it in: its a global asset, a new means of understanding the world, and perhaps the best hope we have for making a better world.

I personally know Tom Foremski and would not have based my piece on his story if I didn’t know him as an actual journalist. Tom would not put up data if it weren’t true, no matter how exciting it might be. Regardless, Technorati has issues it needs to deal with or it’s going to face continued scrutiny on it’s performance issues and lack of completeness. David Sifry and team have made a ton of progress in recent months regarding the user interface and features and have squashed a ton of bugs on the way… but if the performance doesn’t get fixed then it’s going to be a major issue.

Certainly the tone has shifted in the blogosphere. Finding and maintaining friendships will be sorely tested in the coming weeks and months. Great care must be taken to avoid misunderstandings, and sometimes, understanding all too well. It’s a time for leadership, not brinkmanship.

It’s always nice when we can fly under the radar, avoidng the messy details of who gets the money and how. I’ve been doing this with attention, building coalitions, evangelizing the obvious, wheeling and dealing. Recently I’ve stopped all that, partly because others have picked up the banner and mostly because I’m sick and tired of it. I’ve tried to explain why I’m no evangelist, only to come off sounding like I’m evangelizing the idea.

How Technorati hopes to market its treasure trove of data it collects on millions of blogs to corporations, exposing the relaxed intimacy of online conversations. It’s all part of a growing ecosystem of companies hoping to profit handsomely from the work of bloggers [Read].

Right now, according to Technorati, the item has been blogged about sixteen times. The top response (in reverse chronological order, from the search), posted twenty minutes ago by DeepLinking, says,

I gotta know how much Technorati is charging for the blog-clipping service SiliconValleyWatcher is talking about [via Jason Calacanis]. However, SVW’s shocked tone about the whole thing is silly and naive. If you’re not aware that the corporate world is freaked out about blogs and very much interested in understanding their impact, you need to hang out in the corporate world a little more.

I highly doubt that this service — if it even exists — would repurpose blog content. Technorati has been very good about taking only a snip of people¹s content. I don¹t see Dave taking liberties with people¹s content… Dave’s a good man.

What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati’s expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals. Mr Whitmore barely mentioned his company, and I didn’t pitch anything, maybe I should have 🙂

Of those four, only Mike had something positive to say:

Of course legally and ethically there is nothing wrong with a company using public information to make millions. And I am pretty sure that Technorati advisors and Cluetrain authors Doc Searls and David Weinberger have thought about how this benefits the little guy, furthers the emergence of voice, and is additional proof that markets are conversations.

$$$$$$Billions and billions$$$$$$ of dollars are spent every year on bullshit. On pure crap that is shoveled down our throats, trying to make us believe what they want us to buy.

But what happens when one, two, five ad agencies figure out how to REALLY track what people are thinking about?

What happens when some brand finds a way to put a warm and fuzzy spot in our hearts? Almost as if my magic.

All this is happening because someone named Peter Hirshberg decided to move back to SF. Peter is one of those Silicon Valley guys who’s watched our industry become one of the leading industry’s throughout the world today. All culture, commerce and emotions lead through our industry.

What is known as entertainment, marketing, influence and psychology is driven by technology today. Everything that we know – is ‘swatched’ in the veneer of technology. We wouldn’t be sitting here today, reading this post – if it wasn’t for technology. Almost nothing ‘happens’ without technology. That’s how big we are.

And at the forefront of technology is blogging and social software.

It’s about us, people, and once we get our hands on the wheel of our own destiny – look out world!

Our own realization of what our own power is – is what it’s all about.

Along with Marc, Dave and others, I’m increasingly confused by the messages coming out of Technorati. They are grasping in so many directions — as a consumer service and species of publisher with Technorati.com, as an enabling technology provider with tags and attention.xml, as a business intelligence service. Dave Sifry is a great entrepreneur, but it is impossible to do everything well.

He adds,

The concern raised by SiliconValleyWatcher, that Technorati is monetizing bloggers’ creativity without sharing the wealth is misplaced, I think. Technorati has avoided pirating bloggers’ work by making it important to clickthrough to read full postings. It makes it easier to find the source data of the conversation. Were it to start taking full feeds of data and republishing them for corporate customers, it would be violating the rights of authors who have non-commercial share-and-share-alike Creative Commons licenses, but the folks at Technorati are too smart to make that mistake.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to realize that the “algorithms” of participation and influence — the market metrics for the conversational market — can’t be delivered by an enabler of the conversation that simultaneously shapes the conversation with a proprietary tagging scheme.

Persuadio analysis consistently finds that Technorati tags are changing the flow of data, meaning that any attempt to measure Technorati’s influence has to be conducted by a third party in order to be fair and unbiased.

Technorati, at least according to my old friend Peter Hirshberg’s comments, is talking like it is building Persuadio’s services, but they are not.

The list goes on.

Okay, a few questions.

First, How many witnesses reported on what Peter said on that panel? Answer: One. Another panelist, by the way. How many bloggers jumped to conclusions based on what one guy said?

Next: Are marketers clueless or cluefull about blogging?

If the answer is “clueless,” then don’t we want them to get the clues? Especially if all the raw data is nothing more than what’s been published on the free and open Web, and what’s sold is data about data rather than “repurposed content”?

Next: Do we think they can get all the clues they need from search engines and feeds of blogs and searches about blogs and other stuff that’s already out there?

If the answer is no, then what is wrong with selling those clues to people willing to pay for them?

Some perspective.

Technorati was born as a cool hack David Sifry came up with while he and I were writing this piece for Linux Journal. Later, after Dave made Technorati a company, I became a member of its advisory board.

David and I are friends. Peter is a friend too. I’m one of the advisors who urged David to hire Peter, who’s a brilliant and funny guy.

I’ve watched David and his crew work 24/7/365 scaling a search service that finds everything on the live and syndicated Web — that’s hugely complementary to the engines that search the static Web. They’ve rebuilt their infrastructure more times than I can remember. The whole thing has creaked and fallen a number of times, and kept going, kept improving.

They haven’t always followed my advice (not by a long shot), but they’ve always listened to what bloggers are saying.

Such as now, when I’m on the phone with David and Peter, going over each of these posts, seeing what can be learned from the company’s first experience talking about one of the ways it hopes to serve customers and make their business work for everybody.

Will they make mistakes? Sure. Who won’t?

And really: Was a mistake even made here? How can we be sure?

Will they learn from the public conversation that their own service is exposing to them? From what I’m hearing (and saying) on the phone, I’d say the answer is yes.

Hey, we’re all in new territory here. The big challenge isn’t to bust each other for mistakes. Or to play the Gotcha Game, which is one of the oldest and shittiest traditions in mass market journalism. It’s to help.

From the beginning, that’s what Technorati has been trying to do.

Right now, the helping is going back the other way. Which is a good thing.

This gives me a wonderful chance to state the obvious about this conference: IT IS NOT FOR WOMEN ONLY. Not only are men welcome — a statement that it seems absurd to have to make – but some are planning to attend.

She adds,

This gives me the chance to make another observation: If you are a man who like code and software and things that plug in, and is perhaps having trouble finding a girl who likes Java (and knows it’s not just a coffee) and undersands your inner Geek, this might be the PERFECT place for you to spend a summer afternoon.

The ratio at most tech conferences is hugely biased toward men. That will assuredly not be the case here.

The bull’s eye of her entreaties is Kevin Drum (read Chris’s links for the whole story); but all men (and women) are invited.

Blogher is Saturday, July 30, in Santa Clara, CA: the heart of Silicon Valley. Follow that last link for more info and to register.

I’d love to be there, but I have other commitments. Still, I recommend it highly.

Back to the present.

Nice to see that many of the people I volleyed with there are still around. And that some things persist. (For example, Blogher.) But it’s also sad to see how much is gone. Especially Technorati, which drew a huge amount of discussion then. It still exists as a company, but it ain’t what it was. But it’s good that it mattered.

Here’s how dull that pause — that end we call the front page — has become:

And yet every newspaper needs one. So it’s not going away. But to stay current — literally — papers need something else as well — something Net-native that bridges the static page and the live flow of actual news.

Twitter isn’t it.

Yes, these days it’s pro forma for news media to post notifications of stories and other editorial on Twitter, but Twitter is a closed and silo’d corporation, not an institutional convention on the order of the front page, the editorial page, the section, the insert. Most of all, Twitter is somebody else’s system. It’s not any paper’s own.

But Twitter does normalize a model that Dave Winer called a river, long before Twitter existed. You might think of a river as a paper’s own Twitter. And also the reader’s.

In the early days Twitter was called a “microblogging” platform. What made it micro was its 140-character limit on posts. What made it blogging was its format: latest stuff on top and a “permalink” to every post. (Alas, Twitter posts tend to be snow on the water, flowing to near-oblivion and lacking syndication through RSS —though there are hacks.)

News organizations are shrinking, but readers’ demand for news is exploding.

The tools of news are available to more people all the time.

News organizations have to redefine themselves.

Users have a special kind of insight that most news orgs don’t tap.

Therefore, the challenge for news organizations has been, for the last couple of decades, to learn how to incorporate the experience of these users and their new publishing tools, into their product — the news.

Like anything else related to technology, this will happen slowly and iteratively.

The first thing you can do is show the readers what you’re reading.

Having the river will also focus your mind.

Then, once your river is up and running for a while, have a meeting with all your bloggers.

— and then offers real help for getting set up.

I want to expand the reach of this work to broadcasting: a business that has always been live, has always had flow, and has been just as challenged as print in adapting to the live-networked world.

I want to focus first on the BBC, not just because they’re an institution with the same great heft as the Times, but because they’ve invited me to visit with them and talk about this kind of stuff. I’ll be doing that in a couple of weeks. By coincidence Neil Midgley in Forbes yesterday reported that the BBC News Division would be cutting five hundred jobs over the next two years. I’m hoping this might open minds at the Beeb toward opportunity around news rivers.

In the traditional model, reporting works something like hunting and gathering. A reporter hunts on his or her beat, gathers details for stories, and then serves up meals that whet and fill the appetites of readers, viewers and listeners. This model won’t go away. In some ways it’s being improved. Here in the U.S. ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity are good examples of that. But it will become part of a larger flow, drawing from a wider conceptual and operational net.

A river for media as major as the Times and the BBC flows in the center of a vast watershed, with sources flowing inward through tributaries. Each of those sources can be lakes, streams and rivers as well. At their best, all of them sustain life, culture and commerce along their banks and in the areas surrounding them.

For institutions such as the Times and the BBC, what matters is maintaining their attraction to sources, destinations, and lives sustained in the process. That attraction is flow itself. That’s why rivers are essential as both metaphor and method.

To help with this, let’s look at a watershed in the physical world that works on roughly the scale that the Times and the BBC do in the journalistic regions they serve:

That’s the Amazon River basin. Every stream and river in that basin flows down a slope toward the Amazon River. While much of the rain that falls on the basin sinks into the earth and sustains life right there, an excess flows downstream. Some of the water and the material it carries is used and re-used along the way. Much of the activity within each body operates in its own local or regional ecosystem. But much of it flows to the main river before spilling into the sea. The entire system is shaped by its boundaries, the ridges and plateaus farthest upstream. Its influence extends outside those boundaries, of course, but what makes the whole watershed unitary is inward flow toward the central river.

In his Nieman piece, Dave identifies bloggers as essential sources. (Remember that blogs have a river format of their own: they flow, from the tops to the bottoms of their own pages.) Email is another source. So are comments on a news organization’s own stories. So are other publications. So are news agencies such as the Associated Press. So are think tanks, industry experts and investigative organizations such as the Center for Public Integrity.

Missing from that list are ordinary people. All of those people are in position to be sources for stories, and many already contribute to news flow through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Every one of those intermediary systems cries out for improvement or replacement, both of which will be happen naturally if they feel the by the gravitational pull of rivers at central journalistic institutions such as the Times and the BBC.

But the most important challenge is leveraging what Dan Gillmor famously said many years ago, when he was still at the San Jose Mercury News: “My readers know more than I do.”

As a visiting scholar in Journalism at NYU for the last two years, I have participated in many classes led by Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky. (Most of those were in the Studio 20 program, which Jay describes as “a consultancy paid in problems.”) One subject that often came up in these classes was the institutionalized power asymmetry between news media on one hand and people they serve on the other — even as the preponderance of power to provide news material clearly resides on the side of the people, rather than the media. You can see this asymmetry in the way comments tend to work. Think about the weakness one feels when writing a letter to the editor, or to comment under a story on a news site — and how lame both often tend to be.

This last semester I worked for awhile with a small group of students in one of Clay’s classes, consulting The Guardian — one of the world’s most innovative news organizations. What the students contemplated for awhile was finding ways for readers with subject expertise or useful knowledge to bypass the comment process and get straight to reporters. I would like to see future classes look toward rivers as one way (or context within which) this can be done.

The Guardian is far more clueful than the average paper, but it would still benefit hugely from looking at itself as a river rather than … well, I’m not sure what. It used to be that http://guardian.co.uk went to the paper itself, but now it detects my location and redirects me to http://www.theguardian.com/us. And when I click on the “About us” link, it goes to this front-page-ish thing. In other words, packed with lots of stuff, as front pages of newspaper websites tend to be these days. Which is fine. They have to do something, and this is what they’re doing now. Live and learn, always. But one thing they’re learning that I don’t like — as a reader and possible contributor — is made clear by several items that appear on the page. One is the little progress thingie at the bottom, which shows stuff behind the page that is still trying to load (no kidding) long after I went to the page ten minutes ago:Another is this item at the bottom of the page:And another is this piece — one among (let’s see…) 24 items with a headline and text under it:

The operative word here is content.

John Perry Barlow once said, “I didn’t start hearing about ‘content’ until the container business felt threatened.” But fear isn’t the problem here. It’s the implication that stories, posts and other editorial matter are all just cargo. Stuff.

The mind-shift going on here is that’s a huge value-subtract for both paper and reader alike. (Yes, I know there is no substitute for content, other than the abandoned “editorial,” and that’s a problem too.)

Speaking as a reader of the Guardian — and one who reads it in the UK, the US and many other countries on the World Wide Freaking Web — I hate being blindered by national borders, and regarded as just an “audience” member valued mostly as an “influential” instrument to be “engaged” by “branded content,” even it’s laundered through a “Lab.”

This kind of jive is the sound an industry makes when it’s talking to itself. Or worse, of editorial and publishing factota dancing on the rubble of the Chinese wall that long stood between them, supporting independence and integrity on both sides.

If the Guardian saw itself as a river, and not as a cargo delivery system, it might not have made the moves in the U.S. that it has so far. To fully grok how big a problem these moves have been (again, so far), read The Guardian at the Gate, by Michael Wolff in GQ.

Newspapers and broadcast networks tend to be regional things: geographically, culturally, and politically. The Guardian’s position — what Reis and Trout (in Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind) call a creneau — has been its preëminence as the leading newspaper for culture and leftish politics in the UK. Creating something new and separate in the U.S. was, and remains, weird. It would be even more weird if the BBC tried the same thing. (Instead, wisely, it’s just another program source for U.S. public radio. And its voice is clearly a UK one.)

Another term from the marketing world that’s making its way over to the production side of media (including news) is “personalization.” At the literal level this isn’t a bad thing. One might like to personalize, or have personalized, some of the stuff one reads, hears or watches. But the way marketers think about it, personalization is something done by algorithms that direct content toward individuals, guided by the crunchings of surveillance-gathered Big Data.

Some of that stuff isn’t bad. Some might actually be good. But the better thing would be to start with the role of the paper, or the broadcast system, as a river that flows through the heart of an ecosystem that it also defines. That role is not just to barge content downstream, but to collect and grow shared knowledge.

We’re at the beginning of the process of discovering all the things a river can be. This is why Dave’s hackathon is so important.

RSS gave newspapers a new lease on life at a time when the old one was running out. Rivers will do the same if newspapers, broadcasters and other essential media leverage them with the same gusto.

It helps that, at the heart of both RSS and rivers, there are old and well-understood concepts. For RSS it’s syndication. For rivers it’s publishing. Both RSS and rivers use these old concepts in new ways that work for everybody, and not just for the media themselves.

Curation is another one. It comes up nearly every time I talk to a news organization about what only it can do, or what it can do better than any other institution. Some curation should be done by the media themselves. But it should be done in the context of the new world defined by the Net and the Web. That’s why I suggest flowing rivers into the free and open Web. Don’t lock them behind paywalls. My one-liner for this is Sell the news and give away the olds. It’s off-topic for rivers, syndication and the Live Web, but it’s a topic worth pursuing, because old news can always have new value, if it’s free.

And that’s what the Net and the Web were born to be — for everybody and everything: free. Just like the sea into which all rivers flow.

Back to Tennyson:

Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.

Dave says “The New York Timeshome page needs a re-think.” But he doesn’t stop there, because thinking isn’t enough and complaining is worse than useless. (As I’ve often found. For example, here.)

We need to hack up something new, different, better and — most of all — simpler and easier to implement than anything the Times can do on its own.

(The Times is kinda busy now anyway. And it’s not inclined to simplicity, especially on the Web. That’s not a knock. We’re talking DNA here. But the Times can listen and act, as it did back when Martin Nisenholtz and his team followed Dave’s lead and adopted RSS, reforming and reinvigorating the whole publishing business in the process. We want the same kind of adoption and effects again this time.)

The simplest thing you can do as a programmer is leverage something Dave came up with years ago called river of news. As a reader you can blog, tweet and otherwise submit to the world your suggestions.

Think about turning the Times from a static thing to a live one* — literally, from a paper to a river.

Think about how a river forms. Its sources are tributaries: branches that flow in, not out. The biggest rivers sustain life in their waters and alongside their banks. They are at the very core of culture and civilization. And they pour out through a delta to the ocean. The ocean is the Web. The delta is whatever we make it.

I’ll be writing more about this topic in the coming days and weeks, both in service to journalism’s cause (whatever it is — and I mean that seriously) and to wrap my tour of duty as a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter,Journalism Institute. (In that I’m following the large footsteps of Dave, who served in the same post under our friend and mentor Jay Rosen.)

So hack away. I’m very eager to see the results — but not as eager as I hope the Times itself will be — for everybody’s sake. (I’m serious about that too. The Times is the anchor institution for civilization as well as journalism. Helping it adapt may be the highest calling we have.)

Below is my live blogging, in outline form, of the final presentations of work by NYU graduate journalism students in Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 class, which I’ve served for three semesters as a visiting scholar. Open Studio was the name of the event.

I wrote and posted it with Fargo.io. Blake Hunsicker, on the left, also talked up Fargo and outlining in his talk.

Mike Rothman, one of the students, asked me to live blog the event. Jay also asked me to shoot pictures there. So I got off to a bit of a slow start as those two obligations collided a bit. My notes gradually improved after the first couple of presentations, including Mike’s. Apologies for the slow start.

It’s now 1:36 in the morning, so I’ll stop editing at this point and pick up the rest after I’ve rested.

Meanwhile, it was an absolute pleasure and privilege to participate in this class. I’ll miss everybody, but I’m also glad to know how well they did and how much better they’ll do as their journalism careers take off.

Many pitches come from aspiring writers. So turn a burden into an asset. Hence a fan club page where writers can pitch to other writers, with winners getting hired off submissions. Includes real-time editing.

Nice archive of timeless and beautiful stories.

Weekender: archived stories. Much higher than industry average open rates.

Customizing Breaking News. Out of NBC. Can mute some topics, e.g. Miley Cyrus. All about interrupting you properly. Breaking news is not the same for every brain. The app will evolve over a year.

Still lots of news used on desktops and laptops. Still just for Mac and Safari. Still a way off from this being generalized.

You get an inbox, everybody gets an inbox. Latest: Instagram direct. Move your sexting from SnapChat to Instagram. “I cannot tell you how terrifying” this is. Too many inboxes. The more we move to closed networks, the more problematic access becomes for journalists.

Reporting: building beats beyond geography. Buzzfeeds fascinating. Building a beat structure from scratch. Construct reporting structures from the ground up.

Global cooperation. Level of what we have now was impossible in the past. You can make it work now. Example: offshoring. New thing: “collaboration fatigue” 86 journalists in 44 countries.

Robot reporting. Algorithmic, that is. (There are no good pictures of algorithms, but are of robots.) LA Times had a story with a map up in seconds or minutes (8 in this case), thanks to an algorithm that picks up news from data sources. “Our robot friends are allies and helpers.”

Incentivizing truth. Rise of politifact, et. al. People are more likely to believe false negatives based on ideological bent: believing wrong info about the other side. “What if we gave small rewards” they remember X was not the case. Rewards raises likelihood of admitting they don’t know. We talk about polarization. But there is potential for seeing a thinner layer of wrongness.

Presentation. Snow flurries following Snow Fall, which was so big, intense and developed that everybody now has one. Or more. Remarkable that these can now be produced at a high rate. Nicely designed articles are one side effect of the flurries. Stories get more special presentation than in the past. Future will feature nicely designed articles than full-blown Snow Falls.

Adding structure to comments. Venn-ish diagram of overlaps in responses to the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage. Gives people a moment to pause before issuing vitriol.

Infinity comes to radio. NPR’s infinite player. (Not many knew about it, me included.) Creating a radio-like experience that leverages content backlog, and gives NPR a way to see what people like. Pandora-like “more like this” and “less like this.” Mention of PRX, with the Remix service and app.

Responsive and unloved redesigns. One code base that works for all formats. Great solution to terrible mobile websites. Led to a lack of info density on websites. So you have one giant story, with a few other items. Take a moment to consider that it is possible to think too much about mobile. 85% will still be on a tablet or desktop, not a smartphone.

Social. Event Parrot (@eventparrot): a Twitter experiment. Permission to be interrupted by Twitter, for news. “By the way, Mandela just died.” An interesting moment because news orgs have invested in Twitter, which is mostly non-prejudicial. But::: when you live on somebody else’s platform, you run risks.

The triumph of the morning email. e.g. Quartz. 2013 had the rise of the stream. Design choices toward the steam, and a counter-movement toward digest-y summary by email. Qz has story after story online, yet has a success with the daily email.

Everybody has a TinyLetter. A little mailing list for newsletters, in addition to other methods. Reporters now work not only for publishers, but for their own “brand.” The idea is to personalize communications with readers or audiences.

New York Times’ Fourth Down Robot. Real-time notification of success rates in those situations. Punt or not? Remarkable that this is a twitter account and a news service. Find how your team’s coach made a poor decision.

News video for social and mobile. e.g. Now This News. Mobile/Social. Looks like MTV in 1983. Seems a bit alien at first. They can create, on the spur of the moment, create a :15 video for Instagram and :06 for Vine.

Money. Paywalls 2.0: Build the paywall you want. NYTimes set the pace, made it okay for everybody else. We can assume that others will follow the Times’ moves in 2014. They got 750k people to pay. Nice, but slowing. And can you get revenue from those not subscribing. They plan a super-premium level, with access to Times events. Editors will come over and wash your car. Headed toward lots of pay products.

A local television paywall. WCPO in Cincinnati will be the first to put up a paywall. Vetting for Scripps. Hiring dozens of new journos to work there. Until now local TV has not been nearly as disrupted as other news orbs. Many potential problems. Uptake, for example.

The Boston Globe’s Airline pricing. Already has comfort with many Web products. After investing in responsive design, they came out with an iPhone app, that’s just $4 month. The bet is that if you pay $4 for iPhone, you won’t pay $15 at all. So it’s like airline seat pricing this way. Trying to undercut their own model.

Packaging. Putting content in new containers. e.g. The Guardian’s robot newspaper: the long god read. Have a small batch paper that culls successful pieces from the last week, algorithmically, and then lays it out, again algorithmically, in a form that works for readers in a coffee shop. This is the seed of an idea that will have other applications in the future.

Today’s paper. e.g. NYTimes’. If the President gets shot mid-day, it won’t be in here. In this sense it’s like the print paper. It’s a reaction to the constant stream of content, which is still in NYTimes.com. With this you know hundreds of thousands are reading the same thing. (Also, presumably, not personalized.)

Civil Beat’s Law Clinic. An Omidyar project that covers stuff differently. What can a news org be and stand for in a different way? One answer: fighting for the readers. A legal aid center for a constituency. Civil Beat will provide help in the form of real legal assistance. Example of a forced rethinking of what a news org does. Fulfilling information needs in a different way.

Overall, optimistic.

Started Nieman Lab in ’08. Been uphill since then. Continued growth and institutionalization. Seeing that old dogs as well as new ones have new tricks.

After six years on the VRM case, it seems obvious to me that individuals need to be the points of integration for their own data — and of data about them, held by companies. But it’s not yet obvious to the marketplace, since we still lack suppliers willing either to part with the personal data they already hold, or to provide easy-to-use tools that people can use to combine that data, analyze it and put it to use.

So, to help with that, here are a few starters:

Quantified self data. Right now all the data produced by your Withings scale, your Zeo sleep manager, your Nike+ sportwatch, your Omron blood pressure monitor, your Fitbit Flex wristband, your Moves smartphone app, your Sportline heart rate monitor, your MoodScope log, your Accu-Check blood glucose meter and your workout machine data from the gym are silo’d by the companies supplying those devices. Even when that data is open and exportable (as it is, say, with Zeo sleep data), you can’t easily pull that data into one place that is yours, where you can analyze them together, and make fully informed decisions based on that data. There are apps and services, such as Digifit, that can combine data from multiple devices made by multiple manufacturers, but those services are silos as well — and they don’t include data from companies not on a privileged list. If you had that data, you could correlate weight loss or maintenance to specific workout routines, moods or dietary practices. You could present that data to your insurance company or health care provider to get better rates and services from both. The list goes on, and can get very long — especially when you integrate it with the other stuff below.

Retail. Think of what you could do if you had all your spendings in electronic form, and not just on paper receipts and invoices, or buried ten clicks deep on Web pages You could look for ways to spend less money, or spend it more wisely. You could share back some of that data to retailers whose loyalty programs wear blinders toward what you’ve bought elsewhere: intelligence that might get you more favorable treatment from those retailers, while also providing them with better market intelligence.

Home expenses management, including energy and utility usage. Today “smart” devices and metering are almost entirely silo’d by manufacturers and utility services, so it’s no wonder almost nobody does anything with the data. The green button initiative is a good start in this direction, but implementation by the energy industry is minimal, while consumer awareness and tools for examining the data are also nearly absent. The only thing suppliers want to make easy to read are the invoices they send out. There is no doubt that we could save a lot of money, and spend it far more wisely, if we could see and manage that data with our own tools. But until we get those tools, we’ll stay in the dark.

Media usage. Sometimes, when I talk to a group of people in the U.S., I’ll ask how many listen to public radio. Usually nearly all the hands go up. Then, when I ask how many pay to listen, only about 10% stay raised. But when I ask if people would pay if it were “really easy,” the percentage doubles. If I add, “How about if you didn’t have to endure those ‘pledge breaks’ when the station begs for money and promises you a cup or a CD if you call in,” even more hands go up. The problems to solve here are equating listening with value, and easing the ability to pay. That was the idea behind ListenLog, which was featured on the first edition of the Public Radio Player from PRX. It was a nice experiment, but it was buried too deep in the feature list, and the results weren’t easy to get out and put to use. But it would be cool if our usage of media devices and services would yield data we could gather and use. And, if we shared that data back, it would also help media with subscription systems to improve those as well. Most of those are informed by what can be learned only inside their own silos — or by the conventions that include enticements many of us don’t fall for. This is why, for example, I still don’t subscribe to the New York Times, even though I am a loyal buyer of the paper on news stands and often read it online as well. I would also love to pay for music on a per-listen basis, whether I already own that music or not. While that is totally anomalous today, it might not be if all of us had easy ways to weigh and measure the actual value media has for us.

Keeping this stuff from happening is something of a chicken-and-egg problem. Since we lack tools for examining data from various sources, those sources see no need to share that data. And, in the absence of that data’s availability, we lack tools to do stuff with that data.

In respect to personal data, we are where personal computing was before the spreadsheet and the word processor, and where worldwide communications was before the Internet. Once we had the spreadsheet and the word processor, creative and resourceful individuals could do much more with numbers and words than big companies ever could — and that was good for those companies as well. Likewise, once we had the Internet, each of us could do far more with global communications than phone companies and other big players could alone. And that was good for everybody concerned as well.

And, once we have the means to do our own hacking, on data of any size and provenance, we will do for data what we did for computing and communications: make it personal and productive beyond any imaginings that are possible in the absence of those means.

This is why today’s “Big Data” jive, coming entirely from big companies selling to other big companies, sounds very much like the mainframe business in 1980 and the networking business in 1990. It’s mainframe talk. Nothing wrong with it. Just something very inadequate: it ain’t personal. Worse, it’s highly impersonal, unless it’s about how companies can know you so much better than you know yourself.

But that will change. It has to, because we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. As soon as it’s clear how much more each of us can do with data than the corporate hoarders can, a $trillion market will open up. Count on it.

I’m working in WordPress here, going back and forth between the Visual and HTML tabs in WordPress’s UI for composing posts. I do this by making a plain unordered (bulleted) list, and then hacking it in HTML to make the list into a two-level outline. Labor-intensive, it is.

I would rather do this with an outliner. Which I will, thanks to the Little Outliner that Dave Winer and friends are working on. I’m one of those friends, and I’m looking forward to lots of fun with this. I’m an outlining freak going all the way back to when I first encountered Dave, in 1984, when he was working on Think Tank.

Outlining is one of those practices that are hard to get but easy to do once you get them. With the Little Outiner, people finally will. The right people, anyway. 🙂

Journals aren’t going to stop giving us stories, because stories are the main attraction. But lists are the service. They are also the frontier, because journals on the whole suck at lists. That’s what we’ve been learning over and over and over again, every time something Too Big happens. (Sandy, Katrina, the Arab Spring, the financial meltdown, yada yada.) We get plenty of stories, but not enough lists. Or, not the lists we need if we’re affected by the event.

Back when Sandy was going on, I stayed in Boston and blogged it live. One of my main sources was The Weather Channel, aka TWC — on TV, more than the Net. (My “TV” was an iPad channeling our Dish Network set top box in Santa Barbara.) As I recall, TWC had two main reporters on two scenes: one in Point Pleasant, New Jersey and one at Battery Park in Manhattan. Both had lots of stories to tell and show, but as a service TWC missed approximately everything other than what happened in those two places. I say approximately because the damage being done at the time was widespread, huge, and impossible for any one news organization to cover. (And TWC actually did a pretty good job, as TV channels go.) Seen as an outline, TWC looked like this:

SANDY

General coverage from studios

TWC

National Hurricane Center

Field coverage

Battery Park

Point Pleasant

That’s far simpler than what TWC actually did at the time, of course. But I’m trying to illustrate something here: that coverage itself is an outline. Also that cover, as both noun and verb, is something no single news organization can create, or do. They all do a partial job. The whole job, especially for a massive phenomenon such as Sandy, requires many journals of many kinds.

In a way we have that with the Web. That is, if you add up all the stuff reported about Sandy — in newspapers, on radio and TV, in blogs, in tweets, on social media — you’ve got enough info-splatter to call “coverage,” but splatter isn’t what Jeff needs. Here are his specifics:

I wanted lists of what streets were closed. I wanted lists of what streets the power company was finally working on. Oh, the utility, JCP&L, gave my town, Bernards Township, lists of streets, but they were bald-faced lies (I know because my street was on that list but their crews weren’t on my street). The town and our local media outlets only passed on these lists as fact without verifying. I wanted journalists to add value to those lists, going out to verify whether there were crews working on those streets. In a word: report.

I wanted media organizations or technology platforms to enable the people who knew the facts — my fellow townspeople — to share what they knew. Someone should have created a wiki that would let anyone in town annotate those lists of streets without power and streets — if any — where power crews were working. Someone should have created a map (Google Maps would do; Ushahidi would be deluxe) that we could have annotated not only with our notes and reports of what we knew but also with pictures. I’d have loved to have seen images of every street blocked by trees, not just for the sake of empathy but also so I could figure out how to get around town … and how likely it was that we’d be getting power back and how likely it would be that buses would be able to get through the streets so schools could re-open.

But instead, we got mostly articles. For that’s what journalists do, isn’t it? We write articles. We are storytellers! But not everything should be a story. Stories aren’t always the best vehicle for conveying information, for informing the public. Sometimes lists, data bases, photos, maps, wikis, and other new tools can do a better job.

What Jeff wanted was a painting, or set of puzzle pieces that fit together into a coherent and complete painting. A good outline does that, because it has structure, coherency, and whatever level of detail you need. Instead Jeff got something out of Jackson Pollock (like the image above).

We need outlines, we get splatter. Even the stories, high-level as they often are, tend to work as just more splatter.

How do we get outlines? Here are some ways:

If you’re a journal, a journalist, a reporter, a blogger… start responding to the demand Jeff lays out there, especially when a Big Story like Sandy happens. Provide lists, or at least point to them. It’s a huge hole. Think about what others are bringing to the market’s table, and how you can work with them. You can’t do it all yourself. Nor should anybody.

Start looking at the world itself as a collection of outlines, and at your work as headings and subheadings within that world — even as you don’t wish to be confined to those, and won’t be, because the world is still messy.

Go deeper than wikis. Wonderful as they are, wikis are very flat as outlines go. They are only one level deep. So is search, which is worse because every search is temporary and arcane to whatevever it is you search for at the moment, and whatever it is the engine is doing to personalize your search.

It’s not easy to think of the world as outlines. But seeing the plain need for lists is a good place to start.

Addendum

After reading the comments, I should make a few things clearer than I did above.

First, Jeff’s line, “Don’t give me stories, give me lists,” does not mean stories are wrong or bad or without appeal. Just that there are times when people need something else. Badly. Giving somebody a story when they need a list is a bit like giving somebody who’s fallen overboard a meal rather than a life preserver. It’s best to give both, at the right time and place. One of my points above is that no one journal, or journalist, should have to do it all. A related point I didn’t make is that pulling together lists, and linking lists together, is less thankful work than writing stories. True, writing stories isn’t always easy. But story-writing is rewarding in ways that compiling lists are not. Yet lists may save lives — or at least hassles — in ways that stories may not.

Second, seeing “the world as outlines” does not require that any one person, site or journal produce lists or outlines for anything. The totally flat and horizontal nature of hyperlinks (and, not coincidentally, wikis) makes it at least possible for everything to be within a link or few from everything else. While this linky flatness can excuse what I call “splatter” above, it also suggests a need for mindfulness toward coherency, and the absent need for anybody to do everything. As structure goes, the Web is more like scaffolding than like a building. If we see journalism as outlining, and lists as an essential part of any outline, and hyperlinks as a way of connecting multiple lists (and stories) together, we can make multiple scaffolds function together as a coherent whole, and ease the labor required, say, for piecing one’s life back together after a storm.

Third, we are dealing with a paradox here. Outlines are hierarchical, and — as David Weinbergerput it so well in Cluetrain — hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Thus one of the things that makes the Web a web also makes it a poor place for persistent structure. Yes, we can create buildings of sorts. (For example, anything with a domain name.) But all are temporary and vulnerable to future failings or repurposings. Big as Facebook is, there is nothing about the nature of its mission or corporate structure, much less of the Web beneath it, to assure the site’s permanence. (I have exactly this concern about Flickr, for example.) Built into the Web’s DNA, however, is a simple call to be useful. That too is a call of journalism. It is a more essential calling than the one to be interesting, or provocative, or award-worthy, or any of the other qualities we like to see in stories. A dictionary is poor literature, but a highly useful document. It is also a list. A bookshelf with several dictionaries on it is an outline. So is a library.

Fourth, there are many reasons that outlining hasn’t taken off as a category. Some are accidents of history. Some have to do with the way we are taught outlining in school. (Poorly, that is.) But the biggest, I’m convinced (at least for now) is that we fail in general, as a species, to see larger pictures. We fail to see them in the present moment, or in the present situation (whatever it is), and we fail to see them across time. This is why even people called “conservatives” see little reason to conserve finite resources for which there are no substitutes after they run out.

Fifth, we need new development here. My point about wikis is that they don’t cover all the ground required for outlining the world. Nothing does, or ever will. But we can do other things, and do them better. It’s still early. The Web as we know it is only seventeen years old. The future, hopefully, is a lot longer than that.

Meanwhile, a grace of a storm like Sandy is that it can make a serious journalist call out for something serious that isn’t journalism-as-usual. And that the result might be better scaffolding to hold together the temporary undertakings we call our lives.